Robot Animations

A while back now, when I was developing my Unfinished Robot Game, I created this demo as a preliminary template for the player animation / movement sequences. It was also part of me learning how to work with basic animation blending in Three.js.

And just so you know, you can also trigger some combination movement animations such as running jumps by combining keys such as W + SPACE (forward jump).

In the end, I did things a bit differenty, by using some different motion captures, and also being more economical by re-using some of the same motion captures for the different movements.

The motion captures all come from Mixamo.

Another challenge I had was applying the motion captures to a somewhat exaggerated rig, with longer arms in proportion to the body and a bigger head. My process was to download an empty mixamo skeleton, manipulate it, and then build my model around that skeleton. Then I was able to download and apply different motion captures to my manipulated skeleton knowing that all the bones still matched those in the motion captures. Generally the motion captures are created from a standard proportioned skeleton so the manipulated skeleton innevitably causes some issues with some motion captures, such as the arms passing through the head / legs for example. But for the most part this wasn’t too much of a problem when sticking with relatively basic movements. I was also able to tweak some of the animations in Blender.

Since I created this, my modelling skills have improved quite a bit, and I look forward to applying motion captures to more detailed and more organic models in future projects.